Tuesday in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, reporter Jared Sandberg made it official: Email ain't what it was; moreover, it ain't much of anything now. Want to get the attention of prospects, customers, clients? Better try something else. But, how many will?
Case in point. A prospect asked me for a consultation on his problem of, you got it, his marketing emails were not being opened or they were being routed to the spam hole of broken marketing dreams. As a result, advertising revenues for his media operation were declining. The downward spiral wasn't serious yet. But, come on, we know where this was all headed.
I custom-made a low-cost but dynamite-packed integrated basket of tactics, all of which were intended to reinforce each other:
- Make the website graphically nonlinear, interactive and the content more diverse and changed more frequently.
- Trial run 5 blogs, which may in themselves morph into big ad revenue producers. In addition, these could drive traffic to the website.
- Establish and maintain a print, online, broadcast and on-your-feet public relations program. All this would begin with letting the appropriate editors at the 20 top media outlets know what kind of industry intelligence this expert could provide.
- Follow up just about everything with a phone call. Leaving something in voice mail beats not calling at all. No one takes you seriously unless you make contact at least 2x, and through different media.
Despite the lessons of the last global recession - ditch denial, forget sunk costs and quickly try & try other approaches - this prospect decided that maybe things weren't so bad after all. He would remain in the status quo, for now. Maybe down the road ....
How long does his firm have? Answer: 18 months, if the economy stays where it is.
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